1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the present invention relate to systems and methods for prescription or pharmaceutical compound verification. More particularly, embodiments of the present invention relate to systems and methods for communicating with pharmaceutical identification and verification systems across a network.
2. Background Information
Most states in the U.S. require that a registered pharmacist confirm whether a pharmaceutical delivered to a customer is indeed the pharmaceutical prescribed by the physician. A part of this confirmation is accomplished by the pharmacist visually inspecting the dispensed pharmaceutical to verify its correctness. In fact, pharmacists can spend as much as 50% of their time verifying prescriptions.
Despite the verification process, errors are not uncommon, especially during peak operating hours. For example, according to the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy, as many as 5% of the 3 billion prescriptions filled each year are incorrect. These erroneous prescriptions are responsible for as many as 7,000 deaths annually in the United States. Further, due to a steadily decreasing number of pharmacists, and an expected increase in the annual demand for prescriptions to nearly 5 billion, the number of instances in which a customer receives the wrong medication is anticipated to increase.
Not surprisingly, increasing prescription errors have resulted in a growing collection of consumer complaints about potentially serious errors such as wrong counts, wrong drugs, and/or wrong dosages. Thus, there is a strong need for a system to replace the present manual verification technique and to allow the verification and validation steps to be performed automatically and more reliably. A by-product of such an automatic verification system is freeing up pharmacists' time so they can provide better service to their customers.
Several conventional automated prescription verification techniques have been developed to minimize errors associated with manual prescription verification. For example, conventional automatic visual verification techniques rely on the pharmacists comparing an electronic image of the prescribed medication, i.e., a picture of the prescribed medication retrieved from a data library, to the actual medication that is to be dispensed to a customer. These visual identification methods rely on the incorrect assumption that all pharmaceuticals are visually very distinct. In fact the visual difference between pharmaceuticals may be so subtle that errors are likely to occur even when comparing the contents of the prescription vial to a picture on a computer screen.
Spectroscopic analysis is a more reliable method of validating dispensed pharmaceuticals than using subjective visual techniques. Spectroscopic techniques rely on the unique spectral signature exhibited by each pharmaceutical, such as a pill, tablet, capsule, gelcap, gel, and liquid. Representative, non-limiting spectroscopic techniques for pharmaceutical verification include Near-Infrared (NIR) spectroscopy, ultraviolet (UV) and visible spectroscopy, Raman spectroscopy, and Fourier Transform Infrared (FT-IR) spectroscopy.
In order for a spectroscopic system to be able to verify a large number of prescriptions, the database of the spectroscopic system must contain a large amount of information about a large number of known pharmaceuticals. In view of the foregoing, it can be appreciated that a substantial need exists for systems and methods that can communicate with pharmaceutical identification and verification systems across a network.